Global chemical watchdog wins Nobel Peace Prize

FILE - In this Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013 citizen journalism file image provided by the United Media office of Arbeen, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, members of a chemical weapons investigation team take samples from sand near a part of a missile that is likely to be one of the chemical rockets, according to activists, in the Damascus countryside of Ain Terma, Syria. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013, for working to eliminate the scourge that has haunted generations from World War I to the battlefields of Syria. (AP Photo/United Media office of Arbeen, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013 citizen journalism file image provided by the United Media office of Arbeen, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, members of a chemical weapons investigation team take samples from sand near a part of a missile that is likely to be one of the chemical rockets, according to activists, in the Damascus countryside of Ain Terma, Syria. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013, for working to eliminate the scourge that has haunted generations from World War I to the battlefields of Syria. (AP Photo/United Media office of Arbeen, File)

Director General Ahmet Uzumcu of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW, gives an update on the the chemical watchdog's verification and destruction mission in Syria during a press conference in The Hague, Netherlands, Wednesday Oct. 9, 2013. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

FILE - In this Friday Sept. 27, 2013 file photo a car arrives at the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW, in The Hague, Netherlands. The OPCW were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday Sept. 7, 2011 file photo Ahmet Uzumcu, director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) comments on Libya during a press conference in The Hague . The OPCW were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

FILE - In this Friday Sept. 27, 2013 file photo spokesman Michael Luhan gives a brief statement outside the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW, in The Hague, Netherlands. The OPCW were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, Oct. 11, 2013. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Efforts to eliminate chemical weapons won a Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for the global watchdog trying to destroy Syria's stockpiles of nerve gas and other poisonous agents.

By giving its prestigious prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the Norwegian Nobel Committee turned the spotlight both on Syria's devastating civil war and on a type of weapon that has horrified nations since World War I.

The reaction in Syria was notably polarized. A senior Syrian rebel called the award a "premature step" that will divert the world's attention from "the real cause of the war" while a lawmaker from Syria's ruling party declared the Nobel to be a vindication of President Bashar Assad's government.

The OPCW was formed in 1997 to enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention, the first international treaty to outlaw an entire class of weapons. Based in The Hague, Netherlands, it has largely worked out of the limelight until this year, when the U.N. called upon its expertise to help investigate alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

"The conventions and the work of the OPCW have defined the use of chemical weapons as a taboo under international law," the Nobel Committee said in Oslo. "Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons."

Friday's award comes just days before Syria officially joins as OPCW's 190th member state on Monday. OPCW inspectors are already on a risky U.N.-backed disarmament mission based in Damascus to verify and destroy the government's arsenal of poison gas and nerve agents.

"Events in Syria have been a tragic reminder that there remains much work still to be done," OPCW Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu (AKH'-meht ooh-ZOOM'-joo) told reporters in The Hague. "Our hearts go out to the Syrian people who were recently victims of the horror of chemical weapons."

"I truly hope that this award and the OPCW's ongoing mission together with the United Nations in Syria will (help) efforts to achieve peace in that country and end the suffering of its people," he said.

He said the $1.2 million prize money would be used "for the goals of the convention" — to eliminate chemical weapons.

By giving the peace award to an international organization, the Nobel committee highlighted the Syrian civil war, now in its third year, without siding with any of the groups involved. The fighting has killed more than 100,000 people, devastated many cities and towns and forced millions of Syrians to flee their homes and country.

U.N. war crimes investigators have accused both Assad's government and the rebels of wrongdoing, although they say the scale and intensity of regime abuses are greater than the rebel abuses.

Louay Safi, a senior figure in Syria's main opposition bloc, called the Nobel award "a premature step."

"If this prize is seen as if the chemical weapons inspections in Syria will help foster peace in Syria and in the region, it's a wrong perception," Safi told The Associated Press in a phone interview from Qatar.

"But demolishing the regime's chemical weapons alone will not bring peace to Syria, because many more people are dying because Assad's troops are killing them with all types of conventional weapons," he said.

Fayez Sayegh, a lawmaker and member of Assad's ruling Baath party, told the AP the award underscores "the credibility" of the Damascus government. He said Syria is "giving an example to countries that have chemical and nuclear weapons."

After an Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds in Syria, Assad faced the prospect of possibly devastating U.S. strikes against his military. To avert that, he admitted his chemical weapons stockpile and his government quickly signed up to the Chemical Weapons Convention and allowed OPCW inspectors to enter the country.

The first OPCW inspection team arrived in Syria last week, followed by another this week. They have already begun to oversee the first stages of the destruction of Assad's chemical weapons.

The United Nations and the United States praised the Nobel decision.

"Since that horrific attack, the OPCW has taken extraordinary steps and worked with unprecedented speed to address this blatant violation of international norms that shocked the conscience of people around the world," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement from Kabul. "Today, the Nobel Committee has rightly recognized their bravery and resolve to carry out this vital mission amid an ongoing war in Syria."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted the recognition came nearly 100 years after chemical weapons were used in World War I.

"Like the United Nations, the mission of the OPCW was born from a fundamental abhorrence at the atrocities of war," he said. "Together, we must ensure that the fog of war will never again be composed of poison gas."

In the past, seven nations — Albania, India, Iraq, Libya, Russia and the United States, along with a country identified by the OPCW only as "a state party" but widely believed to be South Korea — have declared stockpiles of chemical weapons and have or are in the process of destroying them.

However, the Nobel committee noted that some countries have not observed the deadline of April 2012 for destroying their chemical weapons. That applies especially to the U.S. and Russia, Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said.

"I have to recognize that they have particular challenges. They have huge stockpiles of chemical weapons," he told the AP. "What is important is that they do as much as they can and as fast as they can."

The struggle to control chemical weapons began in earnest after World War I, when agents such as mustard gas killed more than 100,000 people and injured a million more. The 1925 Geneva Convention prohibited the use of chemical weapons but their production or storage wasn't outlawed until the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force in 1997.

"During World War II, chemical means were employed in Hitler's mass exterminations," the prize committee said. "Chemical weapons have subsequently been put to use on numerous occasions by both states and terrorists."

According to the OPCW, 57,740 metric tons, or 81.1 percent, of the world's declared stockpile of chemical agents have been verifiably destroyed. Albania, India and "a third country" — believed to be South Korea — have completed the destruction of their declared stockpiles.

An OPCW report this year said the United States had destroyed about 90 percent of its stockpile of the weapons, Russia had destroyed 70 percent and Libya 51 percent.

Nations not belonging to the OPCW include North Korea, Angola, Egypt and South Sudan. Israel and Myanmar have signed but not ratified the convention.

The OPCW did not figure prominently in this year's Nobel speculation, which focused mostly on Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban last October for advocating education for girls.

"She is an outstanding woman and I think she has a bright future and she will probably be a nominee next year or the year after that," Jagland, the committee chairman, told The Associated Press. He declined to comment on whether she had been considered for this year's award.

The European Union won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for uniting a continent ravaged by two world wars and divided by the Cold War.

Established by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the Nobel Prizes have been handed out since 1901. The 2013 winners in medicine, physics, chemistry and literature were announced earlier this week and the Nobel economics award will be announced on Monday.

___

Ritter reported from Stockholm. AP reporters Mark Lewis in Oslo, Norway, and Bassem Mroue and Barbara Surk in Beirut contributed to this report.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/b2f0ca3a594644ee9e50a8ec4ce2d6de/Article_2013-10-11-Nobel-Peace-Prize/id-82eecf7c8e4a46558350fb92bd6d6fbe
Related Topics: 2013 Emmy Winners   survivor   Sarin gas   evelyn lozada   greg oden  

Volunteers help clean up tornado debris to clear way for farmers in northwest Iowa

Farmers in areas of northwest Iowa, who were already busy with harvesting duties, are now faced with the difficult task of removing tornado debris from their fields. Six tornadoes swept through last Friday night, destroying 21 farms in Woodbury County alone and damaging dozens of others. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries.

Joel DeJong, field agronomist for Iowa State University Extension, says pieces of homes, grain bins, barns, and other material are scattered through miles of soybean and corn fields.  “You can be in one mile (of a field) and you’re fine, and then you’ve got a couple of miles where the corn’s flat and the soybeans are beat up,” DeJong says. “Then, you’ll get on farmsteads where there’s a debris trail of a half mile.”

Volunteers, including area high school students, are walking the fields, picking up thousands of pieces of debris so farmers can safely finish the harvest. DeJong says if those pieces aren’t removed they could badly damage the inner workings of a combine. “At the same time, there are tires on this equipment…and most pieces don’t have to be that big to cause tire problems,” DeJong says.

When farmers can get combines in fields, DeJong says they’ll have to take it slow to catch ears that, hopefully, remain on the stalks that have been knocked over.

He says the harvest, for some, may take four times longer than usual to finish.

Related Topics: john lennon   American Horror Story   Tomas Hertl   Malala Yousafzai   Cressida Bonas  

MMO EverQuest Next revealed by Sony Online Entertainment

Sony's MMO 'Everquest II'.

Fourteen years after the introduction of the original EverQuest MMO, Sony Online Entertainment is bringing a new vision for the future of online games with the worldwide debut of EverQuest Next (EQN).

"With EverQuest Next, we're going back to our roots -- a space we defined with the EverQuest legacy -- and ushering in a new era of MMOs: The Emergent Era," said John Smedley, President, Sony Online Entertainment. ?"Today, many MMOs fail because players consume content faster than developers can create it. With EverQuest Next, we're creating a living world that players are part of and empowering them to produce new content alongside the development team. ?What does the future hold for EverQuest Next and Sony Online Entertainment? ?It's in the players' hands, and we like it that way."

In development since 2009, EQN?"is different from all of the MMOs that have been made before in very important ways", so says Sony.

The game will feature multi-classing to allow?players the ability to explore and interact with the world according to their individual style of play. ?There are no levels in EQN, but there will be more than 40 distinct classes at launch with multi-tiered abilities and specialized weapon skills to collect and master.

It will also have destructible environments, an emergent AI (ie:?Orcs may attack opportunistically because they want an adventurer's gold, not simply because a careless hero wanders into an attack radius), permanent in-game-world change, and a player consequence engine.

"We believe that the bold choices the team is making with EQN will result in a product that provides players with an absolutely new kind of game experience," said Laura Naviaux, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, Sony Online Entertainment. ?"However, there is something even more important to us. As an organization, we are dedicated to partnering with our community to give them a voice in the games we create. With EQN, we are taking this idea even further and offering our players the opportunity to actively build EQN with us."

Sony is suggesting that the new game will launch this Winter.

News10/KXTV

Source: http://www.news10.net/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=252760

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Author Neil Gaiman plans 'Wayward Manor' game for Mac, PC and tablets

Author Neil Gaiman - the man behind D.C. Comics' legendary Sandman graphic novel series, novels like American Gods (favored recently by our own Joseph Keller), Stardust and Anansi Boys, the motion picture Coraline and much more - is stepping into video games for the first time with a title called Wayward Manor. It's planned for release on OS X and Windows this December, with a tablet release to follow. You can preorder it now for $10, though you can spend a lot more, too.

If you're familiar with Gaiman's oeuvre, you know that he loves the macabre, the offbeat and the fantastic. As Gaiman describes the plot of Wayward Manor in a video posted to YouTube, this game will fit in well: You play as the ghostly inhabitant of a haunted manor in New England in the 1920s, and your goal is to drive the living residents of the house away by terrifying them.

Gaiman is collaborating with The Odd Gentlemen, a development studio based in Los Angeles. The Odd Gentlemen's portfolio includes Majesco's 2012 iOS release Maestro Piccolo's Flea Symphony, a music puzzle game, and The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, a well-received puzzle platformer available on Xbox Live Arcade and Steam.

In an interesting twist, Gaiman and The Odd Gentlemen are encouraging people interested in the game to pre-order it now, and depending on how much you kick in, you'll be rewarded with progressively more stuff, from the mild to wild, a bit like the "stretch goals" you see in projects on Kickstarter and similar crowfunding sites. At the low end, $10 gets you a download of the game and early access to a music track from the soundtrack; $10,000 gets you dinner with Neil Gaiman (and up to nine other well-heeled fans) at a venue in Los Angeles some time in 2014.

Mac

Macintosh

Games

Games

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/DCTlU5ncCXU/story01.htm

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Court would hear opposing views in spy cases

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The secretive court that weighs whether to let the U.S. spy on terror and espionage suspects would have to hear from lawyers arguing against doing so under a new plan introduced Thursday on the heels of Congress' rejection of sharp limits on government surveillance.

The new plan by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., would force the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to hear both sides of classified cases. The court, which isn't open to the public, currently hears only from Justice Department attorneys when it considers approving applications to seize Internet and phone records from private companies. The government uses those records to target foreign suspects in terror and spy cases.

The surveillance court has been under rare scrutiny and criticism after National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden revealed in June two classified programs that aim to thwart terror attacks but that critics say invade privacy rights. The court approved one of the programs, letting the government sweep up millions of Americans' telephone records each day.

Schiff, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said allowing a court debate would give "the benefit of an adversarial process and hearing conflicting views."

His bill would task the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board with deciding which of the cases should be challenged by opposing counsel, and potentially appointing the lawyers to argue against the Justice Department during the closed-door court hearings. The board was recently directed by President Barack Obama to scrutinize government spying.

The plan comes on top of already-filed legislation to declassify more of the court's secret opinions and to require its judges to be specifically nominated for the panel by the president and then confirmed by the Senate. Federal judges are already nominated and confirmed, but are later selected for the surveillance court solely by the Supreme Court Justice.

Taken together, the measures "would give the public more confidence in the work product of the court," Schiff said. He said 10 of the 11 current surveillance court judges were appointed for the federal bench by Republican presidents, as was Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Critics have derided the court as a rubber stamp of approval for the government. Last year, the government asked the court to approve 1,789 applications to spy on foreign intelligence targets, according to a Justice Department notice to Congress dated April 30. The court approved all but one ? and that was withdrawn by the government.

Last week, former U.S. District Judge James Robertson, who served on the secret surveillance court between 2002 and 2005, described it as independent but flawed because only the government's side is represented effectively in its deliberations.

Schiff announced his legislation as opponents of the NSA's surveillance programs insisted they will continue to challenge it after a narrow defeat in the House.

Furious lobbying and last-minute pleas to lawmakers ensured victory for the Obama administration as the House narrowly voted Wednesday to spare the NSA program. Unbowed, the libertarian-leaning conservatives, tea partyers and liberal Democrats who led the fight said they will try to undo a program they called an unconstitutional intrusion on civil liberties.

___

Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-07-25-US-NSA-Surveillance-Court/id-8d9d9e44554f4f4998c08ca4d5d46467

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The Neuroscience of Everybody's Favorite Topic

Why do people spend so much time talking about themselves?

By Adrian F. Ward

You will never guess what I just did Image: iStock/Monkeybusinessimages

• 

  In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...

  Read More??

Human beings are social animals. We spend large portions of our waking hours communicating with others, and the possibilities for conversation are seemingly endless?we can make plans and crack jokes; reminisce about the past and dream about the future; share ideas and spread information. This ability to communicate?with almost anyone, about almost anything?has played a central role in our species? ability to not just survive, but flourish.

How do you choose to use this immensely powerful tool?communication? Do your conversations serve as doorways to new ideas and experiences? Do they serve as tools for solving the problems of disease and famine?

Or do you mostly just like to talk about yourself?

If you?re like most people, your own thoughts and experiences may be your favorite topic of conversation.? On average, people spend 60 percent of conversations talking about themselves?and this figure jumps to 80 percent when communicating via social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.

Why, in a world full of ideas to discover, develop, and discuss, do people spend the majority of their time talking about themselves? Recent research suggests a simple explanation: because it feels good.

In order to investigate the possibility that self-disclosure is intrinsically rewarding, researchers from the Harvard University Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This research tool highlights relative levels of activity in various neural regions by tracking changes in blood flow; by pairing fMRI output with behavioral data, researchers can gain insight into the relationships between behavior and neural activity. In this case, they were interested in whether talking about the self would correspond with increased neural activity in areas of the brain associated with motivation and reward.

In an initial fMRI experiment, the researchers asked 195 participants to discuss both their own opinions and personality traits and the opinions and traits of others, then looked for differences in neural activation between self-focused and other-focused answers. Because the same participants discussed the same topics in relation to both themselves and others, researchers were able to use the resulting data to directly compare neural activation during self-disclosure to activation during other-focused communication.

Three neural regions stood out. Unsurprisingly, and in line with previous research, self-disclosure resulted in relatively higher levels of activation in areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) generally associated with self-related thought. The two remaining regions identified by this experiment, however, had never before been associated with thinking about the self: the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), both parts of the mesolimbic dopamine system.

These newly implicated areas of the brain are generally associated with reward, and have been linked to the pleasurable feelings and motivational states associated with stimuli such as sex, cocaine, and good food. Activation of this system when discussing the self suggests that self-disclosure, like other more traditionally recognized stimuli, may be inherently pleasurable?and that people may be motivated to talk about themselves more than other topics (no matter how interesting or important these non-self topics may be).

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/basic-science/~3/bSwRF95T64Y/article.cfm

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Lolo Jones allegedly knocks out bobsled coach?s daughter in a bar fight

No idea how true this is or isn?t, but that doesn?t make it any less interesting. Lolo Jones ? yes, the same Lolo Jones who makes bad jokes on twitter and went public with her virginity at last summer?s Olympics ? allegedly got in a bar fight Friday July 12th and knocked out the stepdaughter of the bobsled coach according to Fox Sports radio host Amy Van Dyken (you can listen to the show here and skip to the 34:00 mark).

Our friends at BSO also found tweets from patrons at the bar on the night in question, and it looks like the reports may be accurate:

A bit odd that this hasn?t hit the web until a few days later, so a cover up may have been in the works.?Jones may come across as very sensitive, but apparently she?s a tougher cookie than we initially thought.

-ALR

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Source: http://losthatsportsblog.com/2013/07/lolo-jones-allegedly-knocks-out-bobsled-coachs-daughter-in-a-bar-fight/

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